Mentavi Health: about 50 sales opportunities after a search across a couple of dozen firms

The situation, the work, the outcome

What the engagement actually looked like

Corey Hart has been in operations and growth in tech and startups for a long time, about eight years of it in behavioral healthcare and mental health specifically. Mentavi is the third digital health company he has worked with, and for the last year or so he has run all of the growth and marketing.

Mentavi Health is a category creator in the US: diagnostic evaluation by asynchronous testing over the internet, for ADHD, anxiety, depression and many other conditions. Because that model is not the industry norm, business-to-business conversations take a challenger mindset rather than a standard pitch.

The company started 100% direct-to-consumer and has evolved since 2018. About half of new patients now come in as referrals through healthcare professionals, and most of those arrangements have no formal agreement behind them. Converting them into agreements with larger health organizations, rather than individual professionals, is why a very intentional internal business development function had to exist.

Outbound was already part of the mix. The team had been running cold outbound campaigns for months and it worked, but it consumed the one business development rep he had at the time. He would rather that person sat in calls closing sales than dug through lists, optimized campaigns, figured out language and troubleshot emails. Pure technology did not solve it either: without a human in the loop you are back to doing it yourself or training a bad intern.

So he ran a search across a couple of dozen firms. What decided it was “the depth of testimonials like this really that helped”, plus domain expertise in healthcare across a nationwide US footprint, where a heavily regulated industry puts hard limits on what you can and cannot say.

Onboarding produced no surprises, since the internal campaigns had already been fairly consistent, sophisticated and successful. What stood out was the depth of the questions and the questionnaire, and that his entire business development team and customer success were welcome in the room so every voice informed how the outreach started.

One detail he volunteered: he kept a few calls with agencies he had been evaluating even after signing. Told who he had gone with, one of them stopped selling on the spot.

Roughly 50 sales opportunities later, the feedback loop is what he points at. Calls get reviewed against the recordings, each conversation is placed in their own ICP tiers, and the targeting tightens from there. He also makes a point of asking any partner how they use AI in their processes, and rates the answer here as safe and smart rather than automated for its own sake.

His summary of the build-versus-outsource question is practical: “our team is so small, the bandwidth is so limited that we're able to really move a lot faster with an external partner like yourself rather than trying to internalize it 100%.”

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